Asus S96J won't power on.

Well, I've owned my S96J for only 3 weeks and already it's dead to the world. This morning I was working at home just fine and I turned it off by pressing the power key, letting it shut down and then put it in my laptop bag.

Got to work, plugged it up, pressed the power button.. nothing.

I tried removing the battery, unplugging the AC adapter and letting it sit for about 20 minutes. No dice. Tried holding down the power button with no battery or ac adapter to release static, nothing. Tried with ac adapter plugged in and battery removed, nothing.

Now as far as the LED's go, all three indicator lights on the front of the notebook are off, then I press the power button and the LED light with the lightbulb goes green but nothing happens. Hard drive doesn't read, fan doesn't turn on, it's just dead to the world.

Another thing of note, when I powered up this morning, CMOS had lost its date/time setting, so I had to press F2(?) and reset default settings. Not sure if this has any bearings on whats going on now but it seems to be quite a coincidence.

Any ideas/suggestions would be a great help, I really don't wanna do an RMA and go without my notebook for a week or two.

Thanks in advance.

 

From what you described you've done basicaly a lot of the right testing, and from the sounds of it, i believe your hard drive might be lose.

Basicaly since you carry it around, the hard drive may have been dislodged and thus causing it not too boot.

Double check if your hard drive is properly inserted, however there could be a chance that the hard drive is dead, but I highly doubt it.

Another thing it could be is the ram may have been dislodged aswell, however it is clipped in...once again the ram could have been faulty, but i doubt it.

I believe it is the hard drive.

 

I hardly believe the hard drive is the problem if the LCD shows no sign of activity and the fans do not turn on. If the HDD is bad POST will still happen, but the OS won't boot up.

RAM is a better guess. Desktops beep if they don't detect the RAM, I'm not sure about notebooks never had RAM problems with those.

Given the BIOS lost its settings at the prior poweron, I'd bet on a BIOS issue. In the lucky case, it's only a BIOS battery issue (again, speaking from desktop experience, don't even know if NBs have a separate BIOS batt, though they should otherwise no way to keep BIOS data while NB is off w/o battery inserted). In the unlucky case, the BIOS hardware is messed up and the chip has to be replaced.

If you can identify the location of the BIOS battery & get a hold of another one, try replacing it. Similarly with the BIOS chip, if the unlikely event that you get hold of a replacement and you dare tamper with it . Or maybe there's a hardware BIOS reset jumper, though I wouldn't bet on it (even if it is, is it documented? Maybe, since it's a built-on). If there is one, try resetting the BIOS with it.

Or it might be a number of other things. Try reseating the RAM and the GPU. Unplug HDD completely to eliminate any possibility that it's the defective part.

If none of these work... send it in?

 

First thing to check would be to see if the CPU has been correctly installed. The screw SHOULD turn 180 degrees and CLICK into place, no exception. If it doesn't, it might've gotten loose with all the movement. Make sure that the four screws are screwed all the way in.

Failing that, you might want to see if you removed the foil sticker and the pink stickers on the GPU and RAM sinks. If they weren't removed, that could contribute to the destruction of the GPU subsystem and would cause it to possibly not boot.

Make sure the RAM is properly fastened. It should be sitting completely in the socket, and the clip should be holding it securely in place.

After that, just yank out all the modular non-essential hardware (HDD, optical drive, WiFi card, batteries) and leave the essentials (RAM, barebones, CPU, power adapter) and then see what happens.

 

I would guess that you have tried this but did you try resetting? The reset button is on underside of notebook.